Ah okay, ya the colors are pre chosen per map, so the original 20 levels you can only play as blue or red. If you want to play as green or yellow you need to play a 3 or 4 player map that has that team color on it.

If the game is playing itself then you are loading bots for both the red and blue team. If you use only the local game settings preset with the is windowed checkbox then you will get the following command arguments -

I don't know if you tried this yet but try it first before playing around with all the settings. This is a versatile engine and you have to know exactly what options do what to make it do whatever crazy thing you want out of it. It's best to start simple and that's what the settings preset buttons are for.

just logged in again since years to say that this remake is AWESOME!
i still visit The ZZone from time to time because i still had faith in this whole Z-Universe. thank you for making this! simply incredible!!!

Just been playing the single player vs the AI and I have to say the computer is very hard to beat. I like the fact that even if you lose the level you get to go to the next level. The replayability and addictiveness is very good. I think I played 20 or so games before I beat the computer ONCE!

Some tips:

Before you start the level, give all of your units some orders. This can mean the difference between success and failure. Also have your soldiers go for the grenades. These give you a massive advantage. You can also change the production of your home fort before beginning the level.

You should also not try to play a defensive game. You must always be aggressive and go for territory as once the balance of power has tipped there is no hope. Gun emplacements aren't very effective against the computer onslaught. My favorite tactic on level 20 was to put two howitzers just below the center intersection. That doesn't work very well in the zod engine.

I edited the map_list.txt file for the single player so I could play level 20 first (which was my favorite level in the original z game)

The game doesn't play identically to the original (especially on level 20) but most of the same strategies still work. In the zod engine, the computer always goes for pyros. A couple of Lights are quick enough to take down a mobile missile. Mobile missiles can destroy anything as long as you keep out of range of your targets (if you run away from anything chasing you, mobile missiles are really effective)

A couple of things I noticed: Tanks will not blow up obstacles automatically like in the original. Also the game was problematic in openGL mode for me. Scrolling wasn't working on certain sides of the screen and the background didn't repaint over the opening logo. Plays flawlessly in non-openGL mode.

Ya the AI is super aggressive and this happens to be a hard strategy to beat. However after you play the AI enough times you kind of learn some tricks that can give you an upper hand. Actually it happens to be weak against a good defense because it doesn't know when not to send units and tends to send them singlely. Either way no matter what you can never turn your back to it or it'll have you and everyone else beat before you know what happened.

I have ideas for a fuzzy logic type AI and a chess style AI. The fuzzy logic one would just consider more possible choices (like defending) and weigh them better and the chess AI would try to play out (estimate) the entire game right from the start. The good thing about either of those AI's is they can be scaled down easier then the current one (go to nearest target).

But it sounds like you haven't even tried out some of the coolest things about the zod engine like coop play, multiplayer or the 8 player map. There are also 4 3-player maps and 4 4-player maps (level_p03m01.map level_p03m02.map level_p04m01.map etc). So you can play a free for all against 2 or 3 other bots and then have your friends join you on the red team to help manage different fronts etc. Or if you wanted you can just load it all with bots and just watch how they would fight each other.

One thing I've noticed is most people stick to single player and don't talk on the forums so they never get a chance to learn what all the engine can do

Thanks for your reply. No, I had no idea there were multiplayer abilities with the zod engine. Awesome! I had a go last night and got soundly thrashed in 4 player (3 bots versus me) multiplayer. I'm going to have to rethink my strategy. heh heh. Maybe if there were a button on the launcher program to do the multiplayer settings I would have tried it earlier. I really like clicking on the "previous settings" button as it saves me a bit of typing.

I wonder if the unit production menus could be done with keystrokes because sometimes I have trouble clicking on cancel to change the button. I like to run at 1024x768 resolution and the menu is a bit small. I can't really see what I'm doing too clearly especially in the heat of battle. Maybe if I could click on the building and hit "l for laser, g for grunt, etc". Also maybe I'm doing it wrong but when I select a building it doesn't deselect the current unit that is selected. So if I try to set a waypoint for the building unit output, the current unit goes there instead. I end up doing a bit of clicking around to deselect the unit first then reselect the building.

Well on the main server you can do commands such as /stopbot blue ... etc to start and stop bots. You can use /help to see all the available commands, and /help startbot to learn how to use the command.

Actually every game is multiplayer, when you are playing "offline / single player" technically if you have your ports open it is possible for someone to join in or leave at any time.

As for the production menu though we've got an upgrade already in the works thanks to defragen1 (also you can use mouse scroll) -

Right now I am just wrapping up the first linux distribution of the game. Maybe I will do the mac version next, or start working on that gui upgrade. I might install fog of war next too. Glad you are liking it =)

Logged in for the first time in years to say this is brilliant! Good job, this is amazing work

However, I've played through the single player a bit (on level one) and I'm sure units have much more health in them this time. I was using my jeep to shoot at some grunts, and they managed to get through all 20 grenades and still shoot me some more before my jeep finally killed the three of them! I've also noticed that the jeep robot doesn't get "shot out of" but I think this may be because the robot health is set too high? I'm not too sure, this is just what I've realised, maybe tone the 'bot health down a bit

Apart from that good work, this is truly amazing Did you rip the sprites from the original Z?

I'm afraid the server z game 2 is full. However, I have set up two more:-

Ya its hard to get it balanced perfectly like the original. Because of this though all the unit damages and health's can be easily edited with a default_settings.txt . So if you want to play around with how much health units have, or damage they do, or how effectively they snipe you can just edit that file.

Yup thanks to everyone here hacking the graphics etc we were able to make it =)